The Myth Of American Capitalism Exposed: Competition Is Dying As Corporations Gobble Up Everything

Vibrant competition is absolutely essential in order for a capitalist economic system to function effectively. Unfortunately, in the United States today we are witnessing the death of competition in industry after industry as the biggest corporations increasingly gobble up all of their competitors.

John D. Rockefeller famously once said that “competition is a sin”, and he was one of America’s very first oligopolists. According to Google, an oligopoly is “a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers”, and that is a perfect description of the current state of affairs in many major industries. In early America, corporations were greatly limited in scope, and in most instances they were only supposed to exist temporarily. But today the largest corporations have become so huge that they literally dominate our entire society, and that is not good for any of us.

Just look at what is happening in the airline industry. When I was growing up, there were literally dozens of airlines, but now four major corporations control everything and they have been making gigantic profits…

AMERICA’S airlines used to be famous for two things: terrible service and worse finances. Today flyers still endure hidden fees, late flights, bruised knees, clapped-out fittings and sub-par food. Yet airlines now make juicy profits. Scheduled passenger airlines reported an after-tax net profit of $15.5bn in 2017, up from $14bn in 2016.

What is true of the airline industry is increasingly true of America’s economy. Profits have risen in most rich countries over the past ten years but the increase has been biggest for American firms. Coupled with an increasing concentration of ownership, this means the fruits of economic growth are being monopolised.

If you don’t like how an airline is treating you, in some cases you can choose to fly with someone else next time.

But as a recent Bloomberg article pointed out, that is becoming increasingly difficult to do…

United, for example, dominates many of the country’s largest airports. In Houston, United has around a 60 percent market share, in Newark 51 percent, in Washington Dulles 43 percent, in San Francisco 38 percent and in Chicago 31 percent. This situation is even more skewed for other airlines. For example, Delta has an 80 percent market share in Atlanta. For many routes, you simply have no choice.

And of course the airline industry is far from alone. In sector after sector, economic power is becoming concentrated in just a few hands.

For a moment, I would like you to consider these numbers…

Two corporations control 90 percent of the beer Americans drink.

Five banks control about half of the nation’s banking assets.

Many states have health insurance markets where the top two insurers have an 80 percent to 90 percent market share. For example, in Alabama one company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, has an 84 percent market share and in Hawaii it has 65 percent market share.

When it comes to high-speed Internet access, almost all markets are local monopolies; over 75 percent of households have no choice with only one provider.

Four players control the entire U.S. beef market and have carved up the country.

After two mergers this year, three companies will control 70 percent of the world’s pesticide market and 80 percent of the U.S. corn-seed market.

I knew that things were bad, but I didn’t know that they were that bad.

Capitalism works best when competition is maximized. In socialist systems, the government itself becomes a major player in the game, and that is never a desirable outcome. Instead, what we want is for the government to serve as a “referee” that enforces rules that encourage free and fair competition. Jonathan Tepper, the author of “The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition”, made this point very well in an excerpt from his new book…

Capitalism is a game where competitors play by rules on which everyone agrees. The government is the referee, and just as you need a referee and a set of agreed rules for a good basketball game, you need rules to promote competition in the economy.

Left to their own devices, firms will use any available means to crush their rivals. Today, the state, as referee, has not enforced rules that would increase competition, and through regulatory capture has created rules that limit competition.

Our founders were very suspicious of large concentrations of power. That is why they wanted a very limited federal government, and that is also why they put substantial restrictions on corporate entities.

When power is greatly concentrated, most of the rewards tend to flow to the very top of the pyramid, and that is precisely what we have been witnessing. The following comes from the New York Times…

Even when economic growth has been decent, as it is now, most of the bounty has flowed to the top. Median weekly earnings have grown a miserly 0.1 percent a year since 1979. The typical American family today has a lower net worththan the typical family did 20 years ago. Life expectancy, shockingly, has fallen this decade.

So what is the solution?

Well, one of the big things that we need to do is to stop crushing small business.

In America today, the rate of small business creation has been hovering near all-time lows and the percentage of Americans that are working for themselves has been hovering near all-time lows.

In order for more competition to exist, we need more competitors to enter the marketplace, but instead we have been crushing “the little guy” with mountains of regulations and deeply oppressive taxes.

And you know what? Many of the big corporations actually like all of the red tape because they know that they can handle it much easier than their much smaller competitors can. That gives them a competitive advantage, and it creates a barrier to entry that is difficult to overcome.

When I was in school, I was taught that one of the reasons why the U.S. system was so much better than communist systems was because we had so many more choices.

But today our choices are very limited in industry after industry, and the gigantic corporate entities that dominate everything don’t really care if we like it or not.

We can do so much better than this, but in order to do so we must return to the values and principles that this nation was originally founded upon.

I said it once, i say it again…Capitalism needs a roof to prevent greed from harming us. A roof that limits how much money a single individual can hold at a time, which is tide to the wealth of the city he conducts business in. Anything he makes over the limit goes directly into the cities wealth to create a fixed bottom for humanity as well. This way bottom and roof will forever be connected, the rich can only get richer if they raise the bottom with them, the middle class will never loose sight of the top, and the poor will never be in danger of falling through the cracks.

The only ones who would complain about such a system are the current elites and their criminal empire of jewish usury.

Look at the American technology sector. The sole motivation for VC investments in tech is gigantic ROI in an "EXIT" event. In this event the company is purchased by an existing corporate behemoth or a private equity firm. This is literally the main goal of tech founders in silicon valley. Create value and get Jewish IOUs in return so they can take over cities and price out undesirables.

Such a system you propose could never exist because those with money will give money to those holding the guns to look the other way. That's why we have such a cluster fuck today. If you make sufficient money, you pay off the right people, bubble to the top, make sure everyone is paid off all the time. It's a delicate balance.

That is why the fuhrer will have all control over who is granted property. That is the best way. All within the domain is rightful property of the nation, and the Fuhrer/King, as the sovereign steward of the nation has absolute authority over granting property rights. Problem solved.

Easy way to fix that as well…state controlled, OPENLY/TRANSPARENTLY handled on public level, yet anonymous on private accounts that are under the individual limit. This way the elite will stand on a plateau and the money they spend can only help others to reach it, which means they will have to work hard for the collective if they want more riches for themselves.

spend a century regulating everythingregulate it some morecorporations ask for even more regulationregulate them even morecompetition mysteriously vanishesAre you telling me that when you artificially raise the barrier to entr on a market, that that market will see less competition? Who could have possibly seen this coming.

Many of the big corporations actually like all of the red tape because they know that they can handle it much easier than their much smaller competitors can. That gives them a competitive advantage, and it creates a barrier to entry that is difficult to overcome.

Implement socialismCall it capitalism<Capitalism failed, guys!The United States is not Capitalist. The government controls the schools, the laws, the police, it regulates businesses, taxes consumers, redistributes wealth to the poor and unemployed, religious traditions like marriage are co-opted and turned into legal institutions controlled directly by the state.I'm sure you've never employed anyone in your life, and you've never had to run a business before, so maybe you aren't familiar with how absolutely fucked we are by the government and its regulations. The reason big businesses can stay ahead of competition and out maneuver them despite their size is that they can hire an airplane hangar full of lawyers to do the hundreds of hours of form-filling that small business owners have to do themselves. You can't even do business as you please across county lines: 'Oh well the tax here is 4.73% but in this county it's 4.60% and you have to collect on this day, no sooner and no later,' and this stuff adds up to literally hundreds of hours not being able to work, because you can't hire lawyers and advisers to cut down the bureaucracy for you–bureaucracy that the big businesses created to drive out competition, which is the exact opposite of a free market.All these big industries–airlines, automotive, whatever, they're all legislated by the unions. Unions force membership, with the law, they use their fees to lobby. And when Boeing built a factory in South Carolina, where there was no union, Obama tried to use the courts to take away their build permit, and hell, here we are years later and they started unionizing this year anyway.Just because people are buying and selling things doesn't make this a free market, people bought and sold things in the Soviet Union ffs. Yeah I know, 'Real capitalism has never been tried,' the thing is, when a so-called capitalist economy seems to fail, but we can then trace the failure back to a government program or law, it kinda wasn't capitalism; that's not a fallacy, it's just facts.

What Capitalism is, is the voluntary exchange of property and services. Rockefeller's particular monopoly was all in all a net benefit to Americans. Mathematically speaking, yes there are inefficiencies to monopolies, but in this case it was an already inefficient field being streamlined. More Americans had access to oil, letting rural Americans work beyond the hours of daylight, read more, and by reducing the amount of kerosene being consumed, it stopped the unsustainable practices of whaling before it destroyed itself and marine life with it.The bottom line is that if people were voluntarily selling things to Rockefeller, what makes it morally wrong for him to buy them? If it has a negative impact on other people, greater than positive impact it creates, then people would easily and willingly not allow it. Saying it's bad because a handful of people gave up control of their businesses is like saying everyone should smoke to keep cigar factories in business, even though the healthcare costs outweigh the economic benefits of those factories. Morality doesn't care if a cost is seen or unseen.

Never confuse free market with capitalism. And the model of consumer choice is only half the economy Without competition you have little innovative n and worse. You don't have a distributed power class. Why do you think a few zios run our govt? Cause there is no upperiddle and wide spectrum rich that cam fund am opposition. One group owns the media. years ago if you published filth, businessman pulled their ads.

free markets != capitalismThis. The Soviet Union and all other commie countries were capitalists, after all, as the basic pattern of oligarchic control of the means of production was the same as in the West. Market capitalism, state capitalism = same jewish shit.

When I was growing up, there were literally dozens of airlines, but now four major corporations control everything and they have been making gigantic profits…Airline pilot here. You need to do some research on this. In the past before deregulation routes were controlled by single airlines. There was no competition on these routes.If you wanted to fly that route, you paid whatever the airline wanted you to pay. You had no choice. The airlines actually have less control over routes today and more competition. It's never been cheaper to fly than it is now. This is because the airlines were deregulated.

The 'stable bottom of humanity' will identify his tithes as weakness, beat him to death in the streets, and then go on starving.Meanwhile the ultra rich will manage to dodge this.Everyone here needs to understand this: it doesn't fucking matter how smart you are, you aren't playing a grand strategy game where you do not have to risk anything real, there is no legislative solution to our problems.

In two years you think there's going to be 0 competition and only monopolies? That's a stupid idea. You're always going to get large firms, but it's going to be hard for them to become monopolies without government subsidies, regulation barriers, and market distortions that are created by loose monetary policy and government bailouts. The monopolies that can survive without those policies are generally going to survive because they are efficient, i.e. they reduce prices.

In two years you think there's going to be 0 competition and only monopolies?There's ID's on this board. Maybe use them? I suspect he was being hyperbolic, but the sentiment is true.

it's going to be hard for them to become monopolies without government subsidies, regulation barriers, and market distortions that are created by loose monetary policy and government bailouts. Nonsense. Companies need no government incentive to gravitate towards monopoly status, nor do they require the government to maintain the status they have.

The monopolies that can survive without those policies are generally going to survive because they are efficient, i.e. they reduce prices.Again, nonsense. You're evidently not familiar economics, economic history, or pretty boilerplate business practices. All competition–to varying degrees–is inherently monopolistically competitive (look it up) and consumers choose only between available alternatives. It's always in any company's best interest to reduce available alternatives to their products (or control them) so they can obtain ever greater pricing power (look it up). A true monopoly has a maximum degree of potential pricing power and can leverage the additional revenues to acquire (or undermine) any competition they face, thus securing the monopoly. Furthermore, large businesses posses much greater economies of scale (look it up) than their smaller counterparts, thereby securing an inherent pricing advantage over their them.

There's even more facets that prove my point, by I think you probably get it by now.

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